Walk a Kb or Two in my Moccasins- Nobody 'splained it to me like that!

Simple answers to Complex Questions and Complex Answers to Simple Questions.
In real life, I'm a Greater-Toronto (Canada) Realtor with RE/MAX Hallmark Realty Ltd, Brokerage. I first joined RE/MAX in 1983 and was first Registered to Trade in Real Estate in Ontario in 1974.
Formerly known as "Two-Finger Ramblings of a Forensic Acuitant turned Community Synthesizer"

A well-informed friend of mine changed my opinion on the "benefit" to Toronto of this merger last night when I popped in with some Home Show tickets.

My new opinion is that the Deal is bad for Bay St - tremendous loss in direct employment, collateral service jobs/industries resulting in loss of huge customer/client segment for real estate.

Take away the Big Brokers and their ancillary staff (thousands upon thousands of big$$ jobs) and who's buying the 5 star condos? and snapping up the pre-sales at $4-500/sqft? who's buying the Forest Hill/North Toronto reno'd mansions? who's buying King/Caledon? muskoka/Haliburton?

We might take this as the first step passed just "reportage of facts" into "advocacy/interpretation" with a thoughtful, co-ordinated public policy commentary on this Core-TO, GTA, Ontario & Canadian issue

Heck, theTD, BMO, Scotia etc all have their own commentators on real estate (to assure their current investors and subtly dissuade same from pulling money out of the Bank/Brokers hands and into real property)

2) The other tout-on-TV Caldwell, is not making money with his own stock packages & products - but will make money on this too (I forget my friend's exact explanation on this)

Friend feels merger will hollow-out Bay St - all the top guys/gals will head to headoffice in London
Hotels, restaurants, consultants, caterers, service-to brokerages industries etc here will be left with no big-important customers

Says TSX is world's best at mining ventures- exploration, financing, taking stock to market. Canada has no manufacturing, all the IT went with Nortel (anything good is on Nasdaq) and the TSX is the trading centre for Canada's specialty -mining.
To lose it to London ... will mean Bay St has nothing(much less) to do ....big deals will be in London (Hemlo, Voisey's, Barrick ...) + BreX of course too

Friend say the TSX outsmarted themselves with high fees - the Big Cdn banks have apparently created an "alternative trading system" Aphla Group that they use to trade (invisibly) between themselves - to avoid the TSX's trading fees.

TSX has lost all that volume .... could recover it by reducing tSX exchange fees